I don’t think people realize just how many USChristian attitudes get passed around in Heathenry, so I compiled different statements and behaviors I’ve seen over the years that reflect Christian notions not original to Heathenry. These examples are illustrative rather than definitive, since I’m only somewhat familiar with different Christian frameworks, but it should be enough to give you the picture:
General Christianity
“The first and most important thing you need to do to practice Heathenry is read the Eddas.”
“You must worship Odin even if you don’t want to, because he’s the head god.”
“The point of being Heathen is to live life in a way that grants you entry to Valhalla.”
“Valhalla is the good/awesome afterlife and Helheim is the bad/boring afterlife.”
“The Æsir are good and the jötnar are evil.”
“Odin is like God, Loki is like the Devil, and Baldr is like Jesus.”
“Odin is more powerful than the rest of the gods.”
“Ragnarok is the End Times.”
(“Us vs. them” attitudes.)
(Not knowing what to do with the the goddesses in general, regardless of one’s gender.)
Catholic-Specific
“To be Heathen, you must serve the gods.”
“We can’t truly know the gods, only attempt to understand them through the Eddas.”
“The gods are distant and don’t care about our personal needs or lives.”
“We must act as the gods’ ambassadors on Earth.”
“Making sacrifices should be painful. That’s why it’s called a sacrifice.”
“Ragnarök is the End Times and there’s nothing we can do about it.”
(Treating the Hávamál as scripture.)
(Using medieval Icelandic law-tracts as a stand-in for Heathen religious orthodoxy.)
(Observing strict worship and insisting others do the same.)
(Adopting a very feudalistic relationship with the gods; lord/servant dynamics.)
Protestant-Specific
“Showing devotion to the gods is done by acting as their hands and feet on earth.”
“You must think about the gods all the time and involve them in everything you do.”
“Why should we merely ‘work with’ the gods when we can worship them?”
“Ragnarök is the End Times and we must prepare to fight on the side of the gods.” OR...
“Ragnarök is the End Times and we must help fulfill it.”
(Behaving as marginalized on the basis of their faith.)
(Reacting badly when confronted with new information about Heathenry.)
(Making bold or even standoffish declarations of faith.)
If you come from a Christian background and hear someone make statements like this, you’re probably going to feel pressured to come up with a counterargument for why it’s okay for you to disagree. What you actually need to do is dismiss the premise entirely. These arguments aren’t reflective of Heathen truths and you don’t have to argue with them as though they are.
This is also not a dig at those who’ve made these statements / done these behaviors before. It’s not exactly second-nature for us to break out of the habit of believing in a specific idea or behaving in a specific way when we believed / behaved that way for most of our lives. However, it’s still worth understanding how specific to Christianity these things are and trying to move away from them.
It’s up to you if you want to point out the nature of these arguments to the people making them. But if you do, I recommend doing so tactfully, with a clear head, and with a very clear understanding about what makes the premise Christian in nature.
Let me know if you want clarification on any of these points and why they aren’t reflective of Heathenry. I’m happy to go into it.
The Celtic Nations reach from the British Isles in the Northern Atlantic, down further South to the countries of Europe’s Western coast.
Although many people associate “Celtic” with Scotland and Ireland, the word is a more encompassing term for these many individual cultures. They are known to have commonalities in their theology and folk practices considering they were of similar regions in history, but are unique in their own rights of course.
Over time, the Celtic people of Central Europe migrated to the outer Western and Northwestern regions. The graphic above gives some further insight to how the categorization of ethnicities evolved over the centuries into the Goidelic and Brythonic peoples that we are most familiar with in the 21st Century. (My practice focuses primarily on the Goidelic cultures, with a bit of influence from the Brythonic, but all of these are valid to include in a historically significant folk practice.)
So, if you’re considering studying Celtic folk magick or Celtic paganism in its broader form, take into consideration that you may be adopting a much heavier workload than originally anticipated.
Basically it doesn't matter what religion it is, some people in it are going to be really kind and compassionate, and some people are going to be the worst fuckos on the planet. You just gotta learn to expect that range no matter which religion you're thinking of.
Ethnic Envy: Chapter 1 in a series on Appropriation and Ethnocide in the Witchcraft Community
It is the year of our gods, 2026, and still to this day the modern witchcraft community - though very loud about the subject - relies largely on lists of closed practices, regurgitated factoids, and hardcore policing in order to keep cultural appropriation in check. Why, in a community overwhelmingly dominated by progressives and leftists, is the fight against appropriation ever-raging? To answer this, we will explore the underlying mechanics of appropriation, and uncover a sinister aspect of the history of modern witchcraft.
Culture and Commodity: Understanding Appropriation
Most of us are content to blame racism for the prevalence of appropriation in our midst. And we should by no means downplay its significance in this matter; its existence is one of the reasons cultural appropriation is so dangerous. Racially motivated cultural appropriation perpetuates stereotypes and instils hate and misunderstanding - blackface is the prime example. But, if most appropriation that happened was explicitly racially motivated, there would not nearly be as much appropriation as we see. After all, wearing feather headdresses or sexy qipao halloween costumes has been thoroughly cracked down upon in comparison to the appropriation we still see. It's simply not that acceptable anymore. Most appropriation that occurs isn't explicitly racially motivated, or indeed, motivated at all. From what we see among our peers, most cultural appropriation is accidental, unintentional. So how does that happen?
Turns out, there is a fouler enemy using racism to deflect blame. In her essay, Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance, bell hooks famously wrote:
Within current debates about race and difference, mass culture is the contemporary location that both publicly declares and perpetuates the idea that there is pleasure to be found in the acknowledgment and enjoyment of racial difference. The commodification of Otherness has been so successful because it is offered as a new delight, more intense, more satisfying than normal ways of doing and feeling. Within commodity culture, ethnicity becomes spice, seasoning that can liven up the dull dish that is mainstream white culture.
What I would like to draw special attention to here is this phrase: the dull dish that is mainstream white culture.
Most of us know white supremacy as the explicit belief that white people are better than other races, based in the idea that "races" exist at all (racial theory). But in reality, it goes quite a lot deeper than that. WS has created, and aims to perpetuate, a worldwide social system that regards whiteness as the 'default', and racial features as deviating from that default. This is the 'Otherness' Hooks describes in the above quote. This system is so thoroughly integrated into every aspect of our world, that nobody is free from this bias. You, reader, and me, and everybody we both know, have been conditioned from birth to be able to perceive whiteness, assess it, assimilate into it, and view it as the default way of existing. In order to accomplish this, white supremacy aims to destroy the existing cultures that various white peoples have, to homogenize them under the banner of 'white'. This is why so many white people truly believe that white people have no culture, and also why every time someone says that you should loudly protest.
But keen readers may think back to instances where white supremacists have stolen aspects of certain "white" cultures to justify their actions, like for example the fake Germanic spirituality of historic and contemporary Nazis. And if that was you, I applaud you! You have discovered exactly how this relates to the modern spiritual community.
Desire and Resistance: the History of Modern Witchcraft
What we now know as the modern pagan or witchy community was built on the back of the very first community who were willing to call themselves pagans and witches: Wiccans. I have a longer form post detailing the origins of Wicca and its contribution to white supremacy, but in short, here is what you need to know.
Wicca was created in the 1950s by a con artist named Gerald Gardner. He based this new religion partially off of things he learned from various Western Esotericist groups, and partially off of the pseudoscientific Witch-cult hypothesis. This hypothesis claimed that, rather than it being already marginalized groups who were being persecuted during the European witch trials, it was actually a pan-European pagan religion oriented around fertility magic that had gone underground. Gardner claimed to have met some modern descendants and practitioners of this witch-cult religion, and to have been initiated into their tradition, which he called The Wica. This new movement was supposed to be an ancient, traditionally European religion. Later evolutions of Wicca furthered this agenda, using the Lord/Lady model as a soft-polytheistic way to combine all European paganisms into one, ready-made religion. Homogenization, anyone?
At the time of its creation, Wicca was an almost direct result of the growing resentment toward industrialism and Christianity in colonial Britain. The Victorians yearned for a deviation from what they perceived as the boring, straight-laced Christian culture, their default-ness, their bland means of existing. They craved indigeneity, ethnicity, the perceived 'ancient wisdom' of a fake pagan past - so they sought it by using culture, real or imagined, as a tool for personal satisfaction. And that sense of need, along with the commodification that it causes, has persisted into the modern day. It got more severe in with the advent of the counter-culture movements in the 60s and 70s, which is where we can trace some of the appropriation of Native American spirituality that we can still see today. And then came the internet, and what was originally a fairly structured community of Wiccan and New Age practitioners unintentionally started to mix and mistake ideas and ideologies, as well as import new ones. Today, the modern community of spiritual practitioners is deeply diverse, but conventional witchcraft maintains most of its core features from those early days. Indeed, the very act of calling yourself a witch at all, comes from Wicca. But more importantly, what was once a fringe new-religious movement has turned into one of the west's leading expressions of spirituality. Why? Because the desire for ethnicity has not faded, but only gotten stronger.
So thus armed with information, we return to bell hooks. "Mass culture is the contemporary location that both publicly declares and perpetuates the idea that there is pleasure to be found in the acknowledgment and enjoyment of racial difference." Mass culture, in this context, is conventional witchcraft. Uncomfortable as it is for us to admit, over the last decades but especially since COVID, "witchcraft" has become a trend. The desire Hooks describes made this ready-made religion an easy way to deviate from the white mainstream, and a lack of resistance meant that those perpetuating this cycle couldn't and wouldn't be held accountable. The process of adopting magic into the mainstream could thus be boosted by extreme commodification, like the new idea that 'intention is everything', or the notion of 'universal substitutes', as well as quick and easy identity labels. All designed to make it as easy to swallow, practice, and make part of your identity as possible.
By being a "witch," by buying into the habit of setting yourself apart as those among the oppressed, the unconventional, the ancient or subversively traditional, one is acknowledging and enjoying the pleasure of racial difference, and perpetuating that idea. The desire to be a witch at all, is the desire to be racial. The desire to shed whiteness and embrace ethnicity. The desire to use Otherness as a spice, to season the dull dish that is what people perceive to be mainstream white culture.
And that is where we find the heart of appropriation in contemporary spiritual spaces. The appropriation we see is not that which is driven by hate or contempt, but ethnic envy. The compulsive draw towards all that which appears, to many, to deviate from what they perceive to be plain whiteness. Modern, conventional witchcraft, is often nothing but the perpetuation of a long-lived imperial tradition of cultural consumption, exoticization, and commodification that finds its roots in white supremacy. The appropriation that we see is not meant to mock, but to use culture and defiance as an escapist tool to satisfy a personal malcontent with the entrapment of a post-industrial, post-colonial world. White people's sense of self, sense of own, inherent culture, has been whipped to shreds by the vice of Christian imperialism and white supremacy. All that is left now for them is to take indigeneity from others and wear it as a costume. Right?
Race, Racialization, and the Cycle of Consumption
Wrong. Perhaps the most dangerous misconception of all, in this discussion, is that cultural appropriation only affects non-white people. It is that implicit notion - that white people have no culture, and therefore cannot be appropriated from, or alternatively that white people do not deserve their cultures to be preserved and therefore cannot be appropriated from - that has allowed this harm and envy to live so long in the first place. Appropriation itself has been racialized, perpetuating the cycle of desperate envy directed at anyone perceived as ethnic. It is no longer just racist ideals of mystique, freedom, and exoticism contained in indigeneity, it is also the fervent envy of the associated sense of home and its protection.
In actuality, the appropriation of various "white" cultures is a massive contributor to the problem. Wicca itself is the main perpetrator in our modern community, it's a case in point when it comes to homogenization. It viciously appropriated from various European (and non-European) cultures, misrepresenting them and stripping them of their identity, to create a false narrative of universal European indigeneity for people to subscribe to. It popularized this idea that European pagan religions are all more or less the same, that you can mix and match deities from various cultures and countries and worship them all the same according to a basic religious framework. It strips these cultures of their identity, their differences, their own inherent ethnicity - instead turning them into an easily commodified identity label. It thus turns the wheel of the cycle: Wicca itself became just another 'white people thing', a bland, mainstream piece of white culture that lacked seasoning and interest. We are seeing the effects currently: Wicca has fallen out of fashion, nobody is willing to self-identify as a Wiccan anymore, instead opting for such things as 'eclectic pagan' which in everything but name is the same thing.
The same thing will eventually happen to eclectic paganism, to witchcraft, to 'paganism' in general, and on and on it will go. The snake will continue to slowly devour its way up its tail for as long as we allow it to. Until we start cracking down on real, actual appropriation and homogenization hard, including when it happens to cultures you deem less ethnic, these "white" cultures will continue to phase out of the limelight as they lose their flavoring and are assimilated into mainstream, white supremacist culture - necessitating replacements, necessitating absorbing more cultures into the mainstream. Anything so the consumption at mach speed can continue.
Knowing that exoticism and the desire to participate in it is often a driving factor in people's unconscious motivation when it comes to magic and spirituality, explains why people keep unintentionally finding new ways to appropriate. Understanding that commodification is how this habit is perpetuated, explains why we want to simplify matters of appropriation down to false dichotomies like "closed" and "open" practices. It's all about how to maintain the appearance of cultural sensitivity, while taking the path of absolute least resistance. Symbolic change is easier than real ones. Staring at a list is easier than considering your personal motives.
Per bell hooks again:
Certainly from the standpoint of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, the hope is that desires for the “primitive” or fantasies about the Other can be continually exploited, and that such exploitation will occur in a manner that reinscribes and maintains the status quo.
False Hopes and Good Intentions
I certainly appreciate and acknowledge that people in the community have the very best of intentions. They truly believe, in most cases, that the approach they are taking by heeding lists of "closed practices" and policing other people is how they help, and that accidentally appropriating is all but par for the course when it comes to practicing magic. But we are not fighting an invisible enemy. Like many marginalized communities whose cultures are frequently appropriated have been saying for at least a decade now: "I didn't know" doesn't cut it anymore.
Our community is built on appropriation. Indeed it could be said that our entire community is fundamentally appropriative. Our founding fathers, as well as the very foundations our basic principles and common beliefs rest on, exist because of the appropriation of suffering that was never ours to claim, and cultures that we could not possibly belong to - either because they never existed, or because they did... only a thousand or more years ago. Our community is not about expressing a kind of spirituality that those who join already felt prior to their discovery of the community. If that were the case, theology, cosmology, philosophy and actual real life practice would take center stage. Magic is a trend, religion a token for identity politics. It is for that reason that people struggle to maintain a practice, that people fight for their lives to feel a connection to their supposed beliefs, that people spend more money on books by other practitioners than minutes considering the beliefs of those whose cultures they are invading into. And, indeed, it is for that reason that we simply can't help ourselves when it comes to appropriation.
We are constantly drawn to that which looks exotic to us, because all sense of novelty and individualism has been stripped from "white" cultures. To actually practice paganism, rather than a hyper-individualistic appropriation of it, you have to read archaeology books, historic accounts of folklore, ethnobotany. But nobody does that - including those who write the infotainment books geared toward practitioners. Instead, we appropriate from cultures we perceive as exotic, and when caught, we reframe our appropriations. They're not "chakras," they're energy centers. It's not "smudging," it's saining. Nevermind that "energy" as a modern concept is borrowed from Theosophy, which has its own racist and appropriative roots, and saining is a culturally distinct practice unique to Scotland - but that doesn't matter, because they're white people things. Or to take the example of masked appropriation even further: we may have started mocking the "we are the daughters of the witches you couldn't burn" nonsense, but the victim complex never left our midst: the "broom closet" as a way to co-opt the suffering of queer people who get no choice in their identity, when the physical expression of individualistic spirituality is absolutely a choice; the undying lie that pagans and witches are a monolith severely oppressed under Christianity, when in reality pagans and witches everywhere are not just free from systemic oppression, but actively contributing to it.
Some grow so hopeless with the entire notion of needing to respect culture that they reject culture altogether, or at least they think they do. Some take the route of trying to create their own traditions altogether, with no pre-established framework to operate off of. They are not free from the draw toward exoticism, quite the contrary: they are more likely to end up appropriating by cherrypicking features of spirituality they see others practice or from their foggy memory. Others attempt to combat appropriation by engaging in homogenization and sanitization. They strip their practice of words that have meaning altogether, thinking that just because they call it a "smoke cleanse" or "deity work" it cannot be cultural and thus cannot be appropriation. They live their lives woefully unaware of the fact that everything people do exists within the sphere of culture.
The point of all of these examples being: good intentions aren't good enough. We may not be able to undo the damage done by the commodification of ancient and indigenous spirituality, but we can shift the tides of social expectation and accountability. It is time to stop mistaking tolerance for progress, and by that token, it is time to stop tolerating the commodification of spirituality. It may have become one, but it should not be a trend. It should not be a way to soothe one's white guilt.
-----------------------
In the next chapters in this series, I aim to discuss more ways the community perpetuates appropriation, cultural imperialism and racism, such as the closed/open culture dichotomy and other disinformation, as well as how to decolonize your own practice and motivations, how to recognize appropriation and combat it, and the value and role of culture in our lives and our community. When those parts are completed, they will be linked here, as well as in each individual chapter, and eventually a masterpost. I hope to see you in the next one.
Further Reading:
Climenhaga, L. (2012). Imagining the Witch: A Comparison between Fifteenth-Century Witches within Medieval Christian Thought and the Persecution of Jews and Heretics in the Middle Ages.
“The Dehumanization and Demonization of the Medieval Jews.” Medieval Antisemitism?, by François Soyer, Arc Humanities Press, Leeds, 2019, pp. 45–66.
Simpson, Jacqueline (1994). Margaret Murray: Who Believed Her, and Why? Folklore, 105:1-2: 89-96.
Heselton, Philip (2003). Gerald Gardner and the Cauldron of Inspiration: An Investigation Into the Sources of Gardnerian Witchcraft. Capall Bann.
“From Cultural Exchange to Transculturation: A Review and Reconceptualisation of Cultural Appropriation”. Communication Theory. Richard A. Rogers.
“Plastic Shamans and Astroturf Sun Dances: New Age Commercialization of Native American Spirituality” Lisa Aldred.
How to Recognise When Someone Isn't Actually that Reliable of a Practitioner... A Casual Hot Take
This started off with me initially annoyed by other Luciferian practitioners and how poorly they are constructed and how poorly they are circulated as revolutionary occultists. But it is a deeper issue. So here we go!
A lot of people post their UPGs not understanding that their UPGs only work for them.
No matter how "thought out" the author may (mistakenly) believe their personal dogma is, it only works because they have made up their rules as they go along while experiencing (UPG) that no one else can experience.
Things can be peer reviewed. But their self-made-praxis is not going to be as reliable as they believe it is.
The meanings are rarely transferrable to others.
A lot of people mistake internally coherent for universally valid.
And not every UPG you see someone has is actually substance that's useful.
UPG is still UPG — "Unverified Personal Gnosis" — it is, by definition, personal. It can be psychologically meaningful, spiritually transformative, emotionally stabilizing, creatively fertile, whatever.
But the moment someone starts treating it as externally binding truth for everyone else, things get muddy fast.
What ends up happening is:
They experience something.
Then they assign meaning to it.
Then they reinforce that meaning through repetition, symbolism, selective attention, emotional investment, ritual structure, community validation, and memory.
... Eventually the system feels self-evident to them because the entire architecture of interpretation has grown around the original experience like roots around a stone even if the structure isn't stable in practise outside of that facet.
Now, that doesn’t necessarily make it false. Human beings work like that in all meaning-making systems . This happens with religion, psychology, art, nationalism, even personal identity.
But it does mean the system is often non-transferable.
Someone else cannot replicate the exact symbolic ecosystem because they do not share:
the same subconscious associations
the same emotional conditioning
the same life history
the same ritual habits
the same cognitive tendencies
the same interpretive lens.
... ... ... ... ... ...
So when people (many of which I see in Online Witchcraft Communities) present UPG as though it has objective authority outside themselves, you get this strange issue where the "evidence" for the claim is inseparable from the private framework that produced it in the first place.
It becomes circular very quickly. Especially when people rely on popularity and clout for circulation. They turn into "artistic influencers".
"I know this deity behaves this way because of my experiences."
"How do you interpret the experiences?"
"Through the theology I built from my experiences."
That’s not peer review. That’s autobiographical metaphysics and it's a slippery slope into spreading misinformation, bad metaphysics and spiritual belief systems, incorrect structures. It is the blind leading the blind and there are very prominent figures, especially here on Tumblr, that are not as experienced as they are just "popular" because of clout.
And honestly? I think internet spirituality sometimes struggles with epistemic humility. There’s a tendency to skip from:
"This was profoundly meaningful to me."
Right into:
"This reveals the hidden truth of reality"
Which are vastly different claims to make.
Many of the new beliefs that people may be "pioneering" aren't new. But they also lack fundamental basics.
These popular "occult" folks are not good teachers — not just because they are actually inexperienced and therefore the blind-leading-the-blind, but they aren't coming from a place that is rooted in structures that are reliable and sustainable.
this is where the issue stops being merely "cringe" or intellectually sloppy and starts becoming genuinely risky.
A sustainable spiritual structure is not just:
"Does this feel profound?"
It’s also:
Does it produce stability?
Does it encourage discernment?
Does it survive scrutiny?
Does it account for human suggestibility?
Does it have mechanisms for correction?
Does it prevent charismatic self-delusion?
Does it distinguish symbolism from literalism?
Does it help people remain functional and grounded?
Does it scale safely beyond one personality?
... ... ... ... ...
A lot of internet-occult spaces fail catastrophically at those questions.
Because many popular occult influencers (I do not doubt some of you have names that come to mind) are effectively self-taught content creators first and spiritual practitioners second.
Their incentive structure is visibility, novelty, emotional intensity, and personal branding — not rigor and sustainability, authenticity or sincerity.
And there are very particular names that come to mind that fail these basic checks that happen to be insanely popular and sought after for very wrong reasons. They are looked at as "experienced and great" when they are barely brushing against anything sustainable.
And spiritual rigor is usually… kind of boring from the outside. It's not going to get you as much attention, money, clients, commissions, or popularity.
Real disciplined traditions often emphasize:
- repetition
- patience
- study
- ethical conduct
- humility
- community accountability
- symbolic literacy
- gradual development
- skepticism toward one’s own perceptions.
... ... ... ...
Meanwhile online occult culture rewards:
- immediacy
- certainty
- uniqueness
- secret knowledge
- aesthetic mystique
- escalating claims
- identity construction
That environment naturally selects for people who sound spiritually advanced rather than people who are actually reliable guides.
And you can often tell when a framework lacks roots because everything depends on the personality of the teacher. It heavily relies on the juiciness of the "spirituality" someone has claimed to have developed or the fandom attitudes between the practitioner and their deity(ies) in question.
There’s no durable scaffolding underneath it. No lineage of interpretation. No tested methodology. No long-term community structure. No mechanisms for disagreement except social fallout. No distinction between intuition and authority.
One thing older traditions understood very well — even the strange, esoteric, mystical ones — is that altered states are not automatically wisdom.
This is a severely lacking understanding amongst substance users in the occult.
Visions are not self-interpreting. Emotional intensity is not proof. Synchronicity is not necessarily cosmic endorsement. Charisma is not spiritual maturity. And symbolic experiences can absolutely become distorted through ego, trauma, projection, isolation, or obsession.
Historically, many traditions built entire systems around containing that danger.
Because humans are extraordinarily good at convincing ourselves that meaning equals truth. And this is something that is severely lacking in some content creators I see and even follow.
A grounded teacher — or grounded system — knows how to slow things down. Recontextualize. Encourage reality-testing. Maintain proportionality.
And you absolutely can create your own systems that are grounded! You don't have to be a "sensational content creator." Smut shouldn't be what makes you "experienced". Attention ≠ Skilled and Knowledgeable.
Ironically, truly mature and experienced spiritual traditions and practitiors often become less sensational over time, not more. They tend to develop caution. Nuance. Restraint. A recognition that the human mind is both wondrous and deeply fallible.
I think it goes unsaid that a lot of folk magic is extremely regional to small localities. I practice swedish folk magic, but there's a lot of variation within the same country (in people, climate, landscape, traditions, etc.). it's something I think a lot on, when it comes to predicting future weather/seasons depending on the whether on a certain date. would these dates still be magically relevant to divining weather away from the locality that the beliefs originated from? I'm not convinced, and I think it would take years of developing a relationship with the land you're on and becoming intimate with the patterns of the land to be able to recreate this practice elsewhere
I am with you on this. My own familial practice is diasporic with my family no longer residing in Europe. My grandmother taught me weather predictions on a day to day basis and she would always say things like "It used to be that we would look for the willow warbler to predict the rain. But here, you can look for the house finch." It stands to reason that, while it's possible to perform weather divination anywhere by paying attention, it would take a lot of time and journaling and connecting with the land to do so on a predictable and applicable basis with annual divinations just because there is mush less opportunity to interact with and test the annual patterns.
I live in the pacific northwest, near the coast. When we see seagulls coming inland, we know there's a rainstorm out on the ocean headed our direction.
One of my students taught me that "red sky at morning, sailor take warning; red sky at night, sailor's delight" is broadly true here in the Mid-Atlantic South ... but the more qualitatively spectacular the sunset on the coast, the worse the hurricane will be.
I greet you, highest of gods
Who we call the averter of evil, strength bringing watcher
Zeus Ktesios, and all your titles beside that name you as a god of the people
Meilichios, Herkeios
You who is honored often as leader, protector, king
Who knows well the troubles of mankind
And gives good guidance and aid to your faithful
It is in your name that I make offerings for the wellkeeping of my house
For the protection of all that belongs to me
For the promise of future fortunes
You whose name I pray from the front of my house to the back
Who I call to over the food in my pantry, over the place where I rest
Hear me and place your grace on me
Keep safe all that is mine and may be mine
Let the smoke I burn to you carry my petitions
Find them with pleasure, and ask of me more that I may give
#excuse me but are you telling me that the Apollo pic is made with the help of the SUN and the Artemis one with the help of the MOON??? #that's actually so poetic i want to cry
@gorandomshesaid wait i need to sit with this one. wait.
I really struggle with the blending of science and magic in modern witchcraft communities. not because I think they're incompatible, because I do think they blend together, but because discussions of it often involve grossly misunderstanding and misinterpreting scientific theories in an attempt to make it "fit" the conception of magic. it's very difficult to see scientific jargon misused in an attempt to "legitimize" magic, and I think that discussions around science/magic overlap would hugely improve if there was more comfort in accepting magic without a scientific explanation, and comfort with science not necessarily aligning how you might want it to.
This is part of why I have such an issue with the 'psychological' model of magic. The quotes around psychological are not just there for show.
With the way it is often popularly put, the psychological model is not actually about psychology, but solipsism or materialism. Either the point is made that magic only exists as an expression of and in relation to one's mind, and that it is the only thing that is real, aka solipsism, or the point is made that magic is a product only of the mind, aka materialism.
Then there is the misuse of psychology terms which makes my teeth itch. The one that is getting passed around right now, 'religious psychosis', is just one of many, but it is so popular to use regardless of the circles it is used in, that like a lot of psychology terms, it is beginning to lose meaning. For starters, there is no such thing as religious psychosis. There is psychosis with religious features. There is psychosis with a basis in religion, whether through trauma or expression of particular symptoms. However, there is no such thing as 'religious psychosis'. It is a pop-science term that strips meaning from its purpose, and which, like a lot of pop-science terms, is then used as a cudgel.
Folks can have religious experiences we disagree with, without folks resorting to using terms like religious psychosis. We can doubt the veracity, believability, and content of a person's experience in terms of material or metaphysical reality without being ableist, discounting their sanity, doubting their experiences and/or understanding, or denigrating their humanity. Using scientific language in this way muddies both religious and scientific understanding, while also obfuscating how folks are disagreeing or taking issue with a given perspective or experience, all the while terminating conversation in a thought-terminating cliche.
Jaymison @notsominorprophet - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
